Shinekhen Buryat, a Mongolic language spoken in Inner Mongolia, is one of the 'prototypical' agglutinative languages. A free form often takes bound forms like (en)clitics or suffixes. But the distinction between clitics and suffixes are not so clear.
　It is often said that clitics usually occur outside their hosts, and must be independent in sentences. In Shinekhen Buryat, like other Mongolic languages, a ROOT with derivational suffix(es) forms a STEM, and in sentences, stems occur with inflectional suffixes:
　　　　e.g. idʲ-ee-l-ee. (to eat-[V>N]-[N>V]-IPFVP) "S/He had a meal."
　In other words, all declinable words occur with inflectional suffixes like [STEM-INFL].
If so, we may define clitics as 'bound forms which occur outside inflectional suffixes'. In this paper, we see if this hypothesis is valid or not. In conclusion, I would like to say that the hypothesis is not sufficient to distinguish clitics because some suffixes do occur outside inflectional suffixes. Probably, the prosodic feature -- pitch accent pattern, which I suggested in Yamakoshi (2004), is the only clue to distinguish between clitics and suffixes in Shinekhen Buryat. Keywords: clitic, bound form, suffix, Mongolic, Buryat